LOS ANGELES (AP) — A former volunteer director for the Tournament of Roses has been arrested for investigation of killing a fellow volunteer in 2004.

Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Bob Bishop says 71-year-old Richard Allen Munnecke was arrested at his Alhambra home Wednesday on suspicion of murdering Donna Lee Kelly.

Bishop says Kelly's daughter discovered her body in the trunk of her car after she was missing for three weeks in 2004. The 59-year-old's cause of death was not immediately available Thursday.

Tournament of Roses Association chief William Flinn confirmed that the two volunteered for the Pasadena organization that helms the annual Rose Parade and Rose Bowl football game.

Bishop says Munnecke was linked to Kelly's death through DNA evidence.

Munnecke is being held on $1 million bail.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A San Francisco woman is accused of having a suspected drug lab in her apartment that exploded and injured her and a 12-year-old boy.

Police arrested 33-year-old Angelic Cisneros on Wednesday on suspicion of recklessly causing a fire, possession of marijuana for sale and child endangerment.

The explosion happened Tuesday night in the Ingleside neighborhood, and blew out three front windows of the ground-floor apartment unit.

Sgt. Daryl Fong says it was likely caused when butane was used in an attempt to make drugs. He did not say what kind of drugs was being manufactured.

Fong also would not say whether the boy is related to Cisneros. Cisneros was treated and released from the hospital, but the child remains hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Democrats head into their state party convention this weekend energized by the possibility that they will build on recent gains.

The party swept every statewide office in 2010, has continued to widen its voter registration edge over Republicans and has a chance to gain a two-thirds majority in the state Senate.

Yet this year also will give voters a chance to have a referendum of sorts on the Democratic approach to state government, as Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratically aligned interest groups seek to ask voters for tax increases. The success of those campaigns is anything but certain, with polls showing support for taxing the wealthy but no one else.

How Democrats will position themselves for November will be a big part of the San Diego convention.

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MODESTO, Calif. (AP) — A Modesto woman is under arrest on suspicion of murdering a toddler who was under her care.

Thirty-one-year-old Maria Elena Torres was taken into custody Wednesday night, a day after the child died.

Police say Torres was babysitting 18-month-old Alexandra Medina-Cisneros in her apartment Tuesday afternoon when the child stopped breathing. Torres carried the girl back to her mother's house down the street before calling 911.

Torres initially told officers that Alexandra accidentally fell down the stairs. Police say her story was not consistent with the child's injuries.

The incident remains under investigation.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Searchers following a map prepared by a serial killer on California's death row have unearthed human remains that could be one of his victims.

Wesley Shermantine was convicted of four murders and sentenced to death in 2001. Investigators believe he and childhood friend Loren Herzog, a pair known as the "Speed Freak Killers," may have been responsible for as many as 15 killings.

Herzog committed suicide last month after serving time for the killing of Cyndi Vanderheiden.

Shermantine recently offered to lead authorities to the burial spots of Vanderheiden and other victims on property once owned by his family.

Vanderheiden's father, John, says the San Joaquin Sheriff's Department called him Thursday to tell him they found a human skull. He believes it belongs to his daughter, who disappeared in 1998.

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NOVATO, Calif. (AP) — Marin County public health officials are investigating two recent cases of an extremely rare brain disease diagnosed in local residents.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a neurological disorder that causes rapid dementia, with patients eventually falling into a coma and dying. It affects one in a million people.

A variant form is commonly known as mad cow disease, contracted by eating meat from an infected animal.

The Marin Independent Journal reports that one of the Marin patients, 59-year-old Aline Shaw, died on Jan. 27.

The county's interim public health officer, Dr. Craig Lindquist, says it's still unclear whether the patients have the variant or non-variant form of the disease. The non-variant form is caused by genetic mutation or contamination from a medical procedure.

Lindquist says right now there's no reason to believe the cases are linked.

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The Fresno Bee reports that Fresno Unified School District trustees approved the name for the new school in Southeast Fresno at their Wednesday night meeting.

The Laotian general inspired an unparalleled reverence among the ethnic Hmong he led during the Vietnam War and later helped to resettle throughout the United States. He died last year at age 81 in central California after battling pneumonia.

Members of Hmong community packed the district's meeting to support naming the school for Vang Pao, and spoke of his work building schools and sending teachers to educate children in rural Laos. The new school will be the first in the district named after a Hmong leader.

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Five major banks including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial will reduce loans for nearly one million households across the country. They will also send checks of $2,000 to about 750,000 Americans who were improperly foreclosed upon.

Harris says the settlement will help hundreds of thousands of homeowners in California, which was hardest hit by the crisis and has more than two million borrowers whose homes are worth less than their mortgages.

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Ayala High School student David Barker's suit against the Chino Unified School District says he's played baseball since he was nine years old and he played on the Ayala freshman baseball team.

But coaches told him more than a year ago that he was barred from playing on the junior varsity team because of his disabilities.

The lawsuit says it's a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Attorney Jason Ryan Thompson tells the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin that the teenager wants a court order to force the school to allow him on the team.

District spokeswoman Julie Gobin says there will be no comment.

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The study by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released this week found that a height increase of 18.5 feet to the top of the 602-foot-high dam would increase storage capacity of Lake Shasta by 14 percent. It would also improve hydropower and salmon habitat.

But raising the dam also would mean some businesses and resorts would have to move. And it would cause flooding of lake-side religious sites of the Winnemem Wintu tribe.

Lake Shasta near Redding is the starting point for the federally run Central Valley Project. The system of reservoirs, canals and aqueducts funnels water to 3.2 million acres of farmland and supplies water to about two million Californians.

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